Adobe CTO Responds To Apple's Critics Of Flash

Adobe’s chief technology officer Kevin Lynch has come to the fore to counter the blunt remarks from Apple’s iconic chief Steve Jobs, in which he tagged Adobe as “lazy”, and Flash as “buggy”, and asserted that the world was moving towards embracing HTML5 technology.

In a rather candid rejoinder to Jobs’ Flash jibe, Lynch said that the omission of Flash technology in Apple’s iPad came as a shocker to many, and that the buyers of the Apple’s “magical device” would have a crippled web experience owing to the omission, Lynch wrote in a blog post.

He further went on to explain that Flash was cannily tailored for “pen computing tablets” around 15 years ago, when that market was in its nascent stages.

He also mentioned that Flash forms an inextricable part of around 85 percent of top online portals, including Hulu, Nike, Major League Baseball, and BBC, to name a few.

Furthermore, Flash is also a significant part of the smartphone arena, and the company was bringing Flash Player 10.1 for smartphone devices with “all but one” of the top makers, including RIM’s Blackberry, Palm Pre, Google’s Android, and Nokia.

Lynch smashed the possibility that HTML5 could overrun the Flash technology in the foreseeable future. He said although HTML5 is gradually maturing, it would be difficult to supplant the Flash technology owing to the fact that the technology is still powering more than 75 percent videos on the web.

Our Comments

Adobe knows that HTML5 could potentially threaten Flash in the medium to long term. Youtube has started to roll out HTML5 in January 2010 and Google like many other players are firmly committed to get HTML5 on as many browsers as possible. Expect Chrome to improve support for HTML5 in 2010 and potentially Firefox will bring the technology onboard soon.